Weekly Column – Page 23

April 26, 2017 by Nukewatch 3 Comments

Chernobyl’s Fallout Spread to “Wherever it rains in the United States”

“Liquidators” getting ready with lead aprons to climb onto the roof of Chernobyl reactor No. 4 after the initial explosions and fire. (RIA Novosti) Half-a-million military conscripts were ordered to work in severely radioactive areas. Ukrainian Health Minister Andrei Serdyuk estimated in 1995 that Chernobyl’s death toll was 125,000 from illnesses traced to radiation exposure.

Commercial Media Forgets Chernobyl Spread Radioactive Fallout Across Hemisphere, and “Wherever it rains in the United States”

By John LaForge, 25 April 2017

Commercial media recollections of the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe almost always minimize its global impact. A New York Times editorial last Dec. described the April 26 explosions and fires as “a volcano of deadly radioactivity that reached Poland and Scandinavia.” This picture is both factually true and grossly understated — because Chernobyl’s carcinogenic fallout went far beyond northern Europe and all around the world — a fact that is easy to verify.

For example, the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) concluded in 2011 that the disaster “Resulted in radioactive material becoming widely dispersed and deposited … throughout the northern hemisphere.” Then, hammering the lesson home like a drill sergeant, UNSCEAR’s report (“Health effects due to radiation from the Chernobyl accident”) repeats the phrase “throughout the northern hemisphere” at least five times on pages 310, 311, 315, 316, and 343. Chernobyl’s hemispheric contamination was well known long before the UNSCEAR review, noted in hundreds of books, journals and scientific papers. The March 30, 2005 Oxford Journals reported, “The releases of radioactive materials were such that contamination of the ground was found to some extent in every country in the Northern Hemisphere.” An Environmental History of the World (2002) by Donald Hughes says, “There were measurable amounts throughout the Northern Hemisphere.”

Yet trivialization is the mainstream media rule, especially after three simultaneous reactor melt-downs at Fukushima-Daiichi have contaminated the whole of the Pacific Ocean. On April 23, Abu Dhabi’s “The National” said about Chernobyl: “Half a million ‘liquidators,’ mostly military reservists from all over the Soviet Union, tried to clean up the affected area.” This is flatly untrue, because no one decontaminated the entire Northern hemisphere. Soviet conscripts worked only the region knows as the “exclusion zone” around Chernobyl reactor No. 4 in Pripyat, Ukraine.

Understatements rewrite history, deceptively misinform

Understatements were the rule in the 1990s. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, on April 27, 1998, described “a deadly cloud of radiation across large sections of Russia and Europe.” ¶ The Appleton, Wisc. Post Crescent, April 26, 1998, said, “Ukraine and parts of Russia were hard hit.” ¶ The New York Times, on April 23, 1998, depicted the disaster as “a poisonous radioactive cloud north of Kiev.” ¶ The Los Angeles Times, on April 27, 1995, limited the fallout to “a radioactive cloud across Ukraine, Russia and parts of Europe.” ¶ A June 1, 1998, Associated Press story restricted the “deadly cloud of radiation” to “large sections of Russia and Europe.”

The website GlobalVoices.org reported this April 19: “Chernobyl… caused radioactive material to be spewed into the atmosphere, exposing hundreds of thousands — if not millions — of people in Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe to extremely high doses of radiation.” In fact, half of Chernobyl’s total fallout was spewed far beyond the three hardest-hit states, going to every corner of the hemisphere.

Of course it misinforms the public to ignore the fact that reactor disasters have poisoned the whole earth, but why?

One reason is that downplaying the severity of Chernobyl — and Fukushima-Daiichi as well — sugar-coats the threat posed today and every day by operating power reactors beyond their original license limits, or near earthquake faults, volcanic regions, or tsunami zones. The hidden agenda behind the profit-driven media’s deliberate belittling of reactor accidents — and the dangers of radiation — is to protect significant advertising revenue. Big utilities, big pharma, big mining, big universities, and big weapons labs makes billions of dollars from increasing the “background” level of radiation. Official background exposure was 170 millirems per-year for decades; 18 months after Chernobyl it doubled to 360 mR/yr; and it nearly doubled again a few years ago to 620 mR/yr.) “Nuclearists” intend to keep it this way, even if it means buying pricey ads claiming that reactors are safe and small radiation doses are harmless.

Chernobyl Doused the Whole Hemisphere

Early on in Chernobyl reporting, it was common for the Associated Press and others to broadcast its global impact using plain language. On May 14, 1986, AP noted, “An invisible cloud of radioactivity… has worked its way gradually around the world.” On Oct. 9, 1988, it said flatly, “Chernobyl … spewed radiation worldwide.” And it reported in the Duluth Herald, May 15, 1986: “Airborne radioactivity from the Chernobyl nuclear accident is now so widespread that it is likely to fall to the ground wherever it rains in the United States, the EPA said.” This warning should never stop being flabbergasting, and should have been the death knell for nuclear power.

The Duluth News-Tribune & Herald reported May 22, 1986: “For the second time since the [Chernobyl disaster] last month, a slightly elevated level of radioactive iodine has been found in a Minnesota milk sample, state health officials said.” Western officials were precautionary. The AP reported May 15, 1986 that “State authorities in Oregon have warned residents dependent solely on rainwater for drinking that they should arrange other supplies for the time being.”

Again, author Donald Hughes notes, “For example, an increase of [radiation in rainwater] recorded on May 12 in Washington State was more than 140 times the background level measured immediately before the Chernobyl cloud reached the USA.”

Today, remember to read corporate minimization of Chernobyl’s effects with a radioactive grain of salt.

April 26, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

“Strike Two” Against Canadian Radioactive Waste Dumpsite Proposal

By John LaForge, 18 April 2017

Nuclear power supporters like to say, “Nuclear waste disposal is a political, not a scientific problem.” Scientists refute this slogan every day.

A case in point is the Canadian Environment Minister’s second “do over” order issued to Ontario Power Generation regarding the company’s waste dump idea. The 15-page order, issued April 5, rejected the company’s sophomoric answers to a previous “not good enough” finding by Canada’s Minister of Environment and Climate Change, Catherine McKenna.

OPG wants to bury 7 million cubic feet of radioactive waste in a deep hole less than a mile from Lake Huron, on its own property on the Bruce Peninsula, northwest of Toronto. It’s there that OPG runs the world’s biggest rad’ waste production complex — the Bruce Nuclear Station — eight old power reactors in varying states of repair and disrepair.

The company proposes digging 2,231 feet down into part of its 2,300-acre compound on Lake Huron, and burying all sorts of radioactive material (everything except waste fuel rods), including a “significant amount” of carbon-14, a cancer agent with a deadly radioactive “life” of 57,300 years — i.e. ten 5,730-year radioactive half-lives. After two years of public hearings into the question of placing long-lasting poisons next to a major source of drinking water, a federal Joint Review Panel in 2015 recommended approval of the project to Minister McKenna.

McKenna was to make a decision by March 1, 2016, but instead demanded better work from OPG. On Feb. 18, 2016, the Minister ordered the company to produce details about alternate dump sites. OPG submitted shockingly shabby generalizations Dec. 28, 2016, and McKenna’s April 5 reply is an understated denunciation of OPG’s obfuscations and evasions. Beverly Fernandez, founder of Stop the Great Lakes Nuclear Dump, told Clinton, Michigan’s The Voice, “OPG has been given a failing grade on its most recent report regarding burying its radioactive nuclear waste less than a mile from the Great Lakes. OPG has now been issued a strong set of new challenges to answer.”

For example, the company has the nerve to that, “All underground facilities (office, tunnel, emplacement room) will be constructed in accordance with the seismic requirements of the latest edition of the National Building Code at the time of the construction.” In fact, as the Minister’s rejection of OPG’s attempted snow-job pointed out, “There are no specific seismic requirements in the National Building Code for underground facilities…. Provide a revised version…”

A public servant doing her job

In requiring a study of alternate potential sites for deep disposal, Minister McKenna ordered OPG to make “specific reference to actual locations.” Instead, OPG tried to get away with citing two enormous geological regions that it said might be suitable. As Jennifer Wells and Matthew Cole reported in the Toronto Star , OPG’s “actual locations” covered an area of 726,052-square-kilometres — about 75% of the Province of Ontario. This blatant attempt at scamming the government didn’t fool McKenna, a public servant who is actually doing her job.

In one of OPG’s more garish displays of environmental racism, the company’s Dec. 2016 report failed to analyze or even acknowledge the land use Treaty Rights of Indigenous or First Nation peoples. Minister McKenna’s April 5 rebuke rightly demands that OPG provide “a description of the land and resource uses for the alternative locations that highlight the unique characteristics of these locations from the perspective of Indigenous peoples.

McKenna’s lengthy critique amounts to “strike two” against OPG, and the Minister’s refutation was praised by community leaders and watchdogs around the Great Lakes. So far, 187 cities, townships, counties, states and provinces in the Great Lakes Basin have passed resolutions opposing the dump — including Duluth, Minn. Columnist Jim Bloch in The Voice asked, “How many swings will the Canadian government give Ontario Power Generation before the firm strikes out in its request to build a nuclear waste dump on the shores of Lake Huron?” The answer may be “no more.”

As befits questions of persistent cancer agents and how to package and keep them out of drinking water for thousands of years, McKenna’s April 5 rebuke lists 23 complex and technically dumbfounding dilemmas that could doom the Lake Huron dump plan. Professor Erika Simpson at the University of Western Ontario reviewed McKenna’s critique and wrote April 7, “It will take OPG perhaps a decade to come up with all the information that is now required … given all the overwhelming problems identified.”

Beverly Fernandez summed up the opposition as well as anyone. “Given the overwhelming opposition to this plan and the potential for massive consequences to the Great Lakes, no responsible government would approve a plan that endangers the drinking water of 40 million people, and a $6 trillion Great Lakes economy.”

April 26, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Nuclear Power Bums, Bailouts and Bankruptcy

By John LaForge, 11 April 2017

You have to hand it to the nuclear industry for socializing costs and privatizing profits. Last year, lobbyists for operators of dirty, deadbeat old reactors won massive public subsidies — bailouts — in New York and Illinois that will keep decrepit, retirement-age reactors from shutting down.

Instead of turning off the rattle traps — and investing public funds in renewables – state-sponsored electric ratepayer handouts in the two states will total $10 billion over 12 years. Remember Reagan’s mythical “welfare queens”? These utilities are welfare gods, propping up decrepit reactors by buying entire state legislatures that in turn legalize monthly electric bill increases.

In New York, the FitzPatrick reactor (Entergy Corp) and Nine Mile Point station (Exelon Corp) join the Ginna reactor in foisting rate hikes on customers, giveaways that will keep the failed reactors spewing “allowable” radioactive emissions to the air and water indefinitely.

Tim Knauss, reporting for the Syracuse Post-Standard wrote, “The once money-losing nuclear plants are now expected to add millions to the profits of parent company Exelon Corp.” The windfall for the dividend-earning class is considerable. A single large power reactor can draw $1 million in profit every month for the owners and shareholders.

In Illinois, the Clinton and Quad Cities reactors will be saved from the axe by a similar bailout engineered by Exelon Corp last December. Like clockwork, Exelon told it investors in February that “cash flow and profit outlook have improved thanks to the New York nuclear subsidies and a similar program adopted in Illinois,” Knauss reported. Dave Kraft, director of Chicago-based Nuclear Energy Information Service, explained the downside in an email: “Mortgaging our energy future by bailing out the energy past deliberately stifles the real energy and climate solutions we need: more energy efficiency, and aggressive use of renewables. The utilities that rationalize ‘bailout’ have no real concern for either climate change relief or consumers’ pocketbooks — only their own corporate bottom line. Legislators who think otherwise are either naïve and ignorant or bought-and-paid-for — or both.”

It gets worse. According to Prof. Karl Grossman, the nuclear “industry hopes that if New York succeeds, it could pressure other states to adopt similar subsides.” One Reuters headline was: “New York could show the way to rescue US nuclear plants.” Case in point: in Ohio Apr. 26, Sen. John Eklund (R) put up Senate Bill 128 which, if enacted, will add a hefty tax to electric bills and bail out FirstEnergy, saving its otherwise bankrupt Davis-Besse and Perry reactors from closure. Ohio citizens’ groups and others are fighting this corporate welfare. AARP Ohio said the give-away would raise electric bills “almost $60 a year for up to 16 years — a real burden for people on fixed incomes.” The Ohio Manufacturers’ Association, the American Petroleum Institute-Ohio, the Alliance for Energy Choice, and the Electric Power Supply Association all argue that the bill only pads FirstEnergy’s bank account while other states –including Wisconsin, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Nebraska — have opted to let insolvent reactors close for good.

To postpone nuclear power’s inevitable demise, the failed industry needs to take the subsidies nationwide, according to Tim Judson, Director of Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) in Maryland. Judson warned April 4 that, “The price would be outrageous. If reactor subsidies go nationwide, it could cost $130-$280 billion by 2030.” Bailout legislation for dilapidated reactors is now pending: in Connecticut, for Millstone 2 & 3; in New Jersey, for Salem 1 & 2 and Hope Creek; in Texas, for South Texas 1 & 2 and Comanche Peak 1 & 2; in Maryland, for Calvert Cliffs 1 & 2; and for nine reactors in Pennsylvania including Beaver Valley 1 & 2, Three Mile Island 1, Susquehanna 1 & 2, Limerick 1 & 2, and Peach Bottom 2 & 3.

Buddy Can You Spare a Billion Dollars?

At the other end of current nuclear biz, reactor construction delays and cost overruns have now bankrupted Toshiba’s Westinghouse Electric. Westinghouse, as the New York Times said, is “a once-proud name that, in years past, symbolized … supremacy in nuclear power.” That was then; before David Shipley, writing for Bloomberg, reported that the March 29 “bankruptcy of Westinghouse Electric Co. is yet more evidence, if anyone needed any, that the economics of nuclear power are not good… nuclear energy can’t compete against cheap natural gas and ever-cheaper renewables.”

Toshiba/Westinghouse has lost over $6 billion trying to build four new reactors in the United States, two in Georgia and two in South Carolina, which may now be abandoned. The Vogtle project in Waynesboro, Georgia was first projected to cost $14 billion: no bargain at all considering the plummeting cost of solar, and wind, and the “negawatts” produced by conservation and efficiency. Now three years behind schedule and with Westinghouse buried under a mountain of law suits, one utility expert testified the actual cost will be over $21 billion. “Too cheap to meter” was always too pricey to fathom. On March 30, Toshiba said Westinghouse had total debt of $9.8 billion.

As Judson at NIRS says, “It’s imperative that environmental, consumer, and clean energy advocates get active — both to stop these bailouts from coming to more states and to make sure [Trump] doesn’t rubber-stamp a massive national reactor bailout, like state utility commissions did in the 1990s. … We can’t afford to let that happen again.”

March 16, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

US Citizens to Join Protests of US Nuclear Weapons Deployed in Germany

By John LaForge

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Blockaders cover the Front Gate at the Luftwaffe’s Buchel Air Base in Germany, which deploys and trains to use up to 20 U.S. B61 hydrogen bombs on Germany’s Tornado jet fighters.

On March 26, nuclear disarmament activists in Germany will launch a 20-week-long series of nonviolent protests at the Luftwaffe’s Büchel Air Base, Germany, demanding the withdrawal of 20 U.S. nuclear weapons still deployed there. The actions will continue through August 9, the anniversary of the US atomic bombing of Nagasaki, Japan in 1945.

For the first time in the 20-year-long campaign to rid Büchel of the U.S. bombs, a delegation of U.S. peace activists will take part. During the campaign’s “international week” July 12 to 18, disarmament workers from Wisconsin, California, Washington, DC, Virginia, Minnesota, New Mexico and Maryland will join the coalition of 50 German peace and justice groups converging on the base. Activists from The Netherlands, France and Belgium also plan to join the international gathering.

The U.S. citizens are particularly shocked that the U.S. government is pursuing production of a totally new H-bomb intended to replace the 20 so-called “B61” gravity bombs now at Büchel, and the 160 others that are deployed in a total of five NATO countries.

Under a NATO scheme called “nuclear sharing,” Germany, Italy, Belgium, Turkey, and The Netherlands still deploy the U.S. B61s, and these governments all claim the deployment does not violate the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Articles I and II of the treaty prohibit nuclear weapons from being transferred to, or accepted from, other countries.

“The world wants nuclear disarmament,” said US delegate Bonnie Urfer, a long-time peace activist and former staffer with the nuclear watchdog group Nukewatch, in Wisconsin. “To waste billions of dollars replacing the B61s when they should be eliminated is criminal — like sentencing innocent people to death — considering how many millions need immediate famine relief, emergency shelter, and safe drinking water,” Urfer said.

Although the B61’s planned replacement is actually a completely new bomb — the B61-12 — the Pentagon calls the program “modernization” — in order to skirt the NPT’s prohibitions. However, it’s being touted as the first ever “smart” nuclear bomb, made to be guided by satellites, making it completely unprecedented. New nuclear weapons are unlawful under the NPT, and even President Barak Obama’s 2010 Nuclear Posture Review required that “upgrades” to the Pentagon’s current H-bombs must not have “new capabilities.” Overall cost of the new bomb, which is not yet in production, is estimated to be up to $12 billion.

Historic German Resolution to Evict US H-bombs

The March 26 start date of “Twenty Weeks for Twenty Bombs” is doubly significant for Germans and others eager to see the bombs retired. First, on March 26, 2010, massive public support pushed Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag, to vote overwhelmingly — across all parties — to have the government remove the U.S. weapons from German territory.

Second, beginning March 27 in New York, the United Nations General Assembly will launch formal negotiations for a treaty banning nuclear weapons. The UNGA will convene two sessions — March 27 to 31, and June 15 to July 7 — to produce a legally binding “convention” banning any possession or use of the bomb, in accordance with Article 6 of the NPT. (Similar treaty bans already forbid poison and gas weapons, land mines, cluster bombs, and biological weapons.) Individual governments can later ratify or reject the treaty. Several nuclear-armed states including the US government worked unsuccessfully to derail the negotiations; and Germany’s current government under Angela Merkel has said it will boycott the negotiations in spite of broad public support for nuclear disarmament.

“We want Germany to be nuclear weapons free,” said Marion Küpker, a disarmament campaigner and organizer with DFG-VK, an affiliate of War Resisters International and Germany’s oldest peace organization, this year celebrating its 125^th anniversary. “The government must abide by the 2010 resolution, throw out the B61s, and not replace them with new ones,” Küpker said.

A huge majority in Germany supports both the UN treaty ban and the removal of US nuclear weapons. A staggering 93 percent want nuclear weapons banned, according to a poll commissioned by the German chapter of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War published in March last year. Some 85 percent agreed that the US weapons should be withdrawn from the country, and 88 percent said they oppose US plans to replace current bombs with the new B61-12.

U.S. and NATO officials claim that “deterrence” of makes the B61 important in Europe. But as by Xanthe Hall reports for the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, “Nuclear deterrence is the archetypal security dilemma. You have to keep threatening to use nuclear weapons to make it work. And the more you threaten, the more likely it is that they will be used.”

For more information and to sign a “Declaration of Solidarity.”

Additional information about the B61 and NATO’s “nuclear sharing” at CounterPunch:

“Wild Turkey with H-Bombs: Failed Coup Brings Calls for Denuclearization,” July 28, 2016.

“Undeterred: Amid Terror Attacks in Europe, US H-bombs Still Deployed There,” June 17, 2016.

“Nuclear Weapons Proliferation: Made in the USA,” May 27, 2015.

“US Defies Conference on Nuclear Weapons Effects & Abolition,” Dec. 15, 2014.

“German ‘Bomb Sharing’ Confronted with Defiant ‘Instruments of Disarmament”, Aug. 9, 2013.

February 23, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Yucca Mountain Scientifically Unsuitable for Rad Waste Repository

Yucca Mountain poses risks beyond Nevada communities. Because of its distance from the majority of radioactive waste in the country, the transport routes would impact a wide swath of the United States. Rail accidents are not rare, so the risks posed from the transport of this material involve millions of people along shipping routes.

By John LaForge

The Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA) sets strict standards that must be met before a high-level radioactive waste repository can be licensed. The licensing process for the Yucca Mountain dump site, which has cost $9 billion to date, was halted in 2010 because the site can no longer be defended on scientific grounds. In its current location, 90 miles from Las Vegas, the dump would also be unlawful because according to the 1863 Treaty of Ruby Valley, the Western Shoshone Nation holds title to Yucca Mountain and the Western Shoshone overwhelmingly oppose the dump.

While Congressional leaders talk today about reconsidering Yucca, crucial scientific findings (some listed below) should permanently disqualify it. Principle among them is that the geology of Yucca Mt. doesn’t meet the original statutory requirements established by the NWPA. Even after hydrological, geological, volcanic and seismological show-stoppers have been revealed, the licensing process was not halted (until 2010). Instead, NWPA specifications have been repeatedly weakened, leading one Nevada Governor, Kenny Guinn, to accuse the Energy Dept. of lowering standards to win approval for the site.

In 2014, Allison Macfarlane, a former chair of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), warned that when the licensing process was halted, there were still hundreds of “contentions” challenging the application. The General Accounting Office reported that the project’s former managing contractor, Bechtel SAIC, had in 2001 identified 293 unresolved technical issues to further analyze before licensing could proceed. Each contention must be argued before a panel of administrative law judges. Macfarlane wrote in Science magazine that the “[Dept. of Energy] will not be able to submit an acceptable application to NRC within the express statutory time frames for several years because it will take that long to resolve many technical issues.” Macfarlane concluded that “disposal of high-level nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain is based on an unsound engineering strategy and poor use of present understanding of the properties of spent nuclear fuel.”

In 2007, the Bow Ridge earthquake fault was discovered by the US Geological Survey’s Yucca Mt. Project Branch to be hundreds of feet east of where it had estimated. It passes directly under a planned pad where waste canisters would be kept for years before they are entombed in tunnels inside the mountain, according to the USGS’s May 21, 2007 letter. The error means designers must revamp or scrap their plans. Yucca Mt. project officials said they are still developing repository design, construction and operating ideas. The DOE has never produced blueprints that Nevada state officials can review and critique.

In 2004, the US Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that the National Academy of Sciences found “no scientific basis for limiting the time period of the individual risk standard to 10,000 years…” The Academy reported instead that “repository performance” must be judged on “a time scale that is on the order of [one million] years at Yucca Mountain.” It’s been known for decades that some of the waste, as a New York Times science writer said, “remains radioactive for millions of years,” that it “would be hazardous for millions of years,” and, as the St. Paul Pioneer Press reported, that “nearly 100 million pounds” of high-level waste “will remain lethal for millions of years.” The National Academy of Sciences found in 1983 that the “chemical characteristics of the water at Yucca Mt. are such that the wastes would dissolve more easily than at most other places.” The NAS also “make[s] the assumption that a nuclear waste repository will eventually leak,” and “The wastes would … most likely reach humans through water flowing underground through the wastes and eventually reaching the surface through springs or wells.”

In 2002, a mild earthquake on June 14, about 12 miles southeast of Yucca Mt. fueled opposition to plans for the dump. The magnitude-4.4 quake was called a “wake-up call” by critics who pointed to the potential for damage to above-ground storage facilities, where thousands of tons of waste brought to the site would be kept for decades while it cools. “If anyone ever wondered about the wisdom of locating an underground radioactive dump site on an active fault line, this shows why,” Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., said after the quake.

In 1999, a DOE report declared that leaving the waste in storage at reactor sites is just as safe as moving it to Yucca Mt. — as long as the waste is repackaged every 100 years. Given the uncertainties about Yucca Mt. and the risks of moving waste fuel, it makes sense to leave the material were it is generated at the reactor sites while developing alternatives. Independent scientists suggest on-site, above-ground, monitored storage, hardened against terrorism, along with additional measures for safety and security.

In 1998, evidence that the inside of the mountain is periodically flooded with water came in the form of zircon crystals found deep inside. “Crystals do not form without complete immersion in water,” said Jerry Szymanski, formerly the DOE’s top geologist at Yucca. Szymanski’s finding that deep water rises and falls inside Yucca Mt. means “hot underground water has invaded the mountain and might again in the time when radioactive waste would still be extremely dangerous. The results would be catastrophic.” In 1998, the Yucca Mt. site was found to be subject to earthquakes or lava flows every 1,000 years — 10 times more frequently than earlier estimated — according to a California Institute of Technology study. The finding meant that radiation dispersal from the site is much more likely during the dump’s radioactive hazard period.

In 1997, DOE researchers announced that rain water had seeped down 800 feet from the top of Yucca Mt. into the repository in a mere 40 years (as dated by chlorine-36). Government scientists had earlier claimed that rainwater would take hundreds or thousands of years to reach the waste caverns. Federal officials have long required that the existence of fast-flowing water would disqualify the site.

In 1995, government physicists at Los Alamos National Laboratory warned in an internal report that the wastes might erupt in a nuclear explosion and scatter radioactivity to the winds or into groundwater, or both. Dr. Charles D. Bowman and Dr. Francesco Venneri found that staggering dangers will arise thousands of years from now — after steel waste containers dissolve and plutonium begins to disperse into surrounding rock. Dr. John Browne, head of energy research at Los Alamos National Lab, said about the research paper, “Our feeling is that the subject is so important that it deserves additional peer review outside the laboratory.” The DOE’s former top geologist Jerry Szymanski said to the Washington Post, “You’re talking about an unimaginable catastrophe. Chernobyl would be small potatoes.”

In 1990, the National Research Council said in a study that the DOE’s Yucca Mt. plan is “bound to fail” because: a) requiring predictions of safety for even 10,000 years is a scientific impossibility; and b) the Nuclear Waste Policy Act demands a level of safety that science cannot guarantee. The US Circuit Court of Appeals later ordered the government to judge dumpsite performance based not on a 10,000-year, but a one-million-year time scale.

In 1989, sixteen scientists from the US Geologic Survey charged that the DOE was using stop-work orders “to prevent the discovery of problems that would doom the repository.” The geologists reported that, “There is no facility for trial and error, for genuine research, for innovation, or for creativity.” Even the NRC complained that, “work at Yucca Mt. seemed designed mostly to get the repository built rather than to determine if the site is suitable.”

If Yucca Mt.’s containment puzzles can be solved or ignored and it is rehabilitated and licensed after sitting unattended for seven years, gamblers in Las Vegas and scores of other cities around the country will have a problem of health science to face. Fred Dilger, a Clark County, Nevada planner and former state transportation analyst, has warned that when waste trains go through town, “All of the casinos on the west side of Las Vegas Boulevard would be bathed in gamma radiation.”